I grew up in a world before the internet and a computer in everyone’s pocket. Not long before — the 1970s and 80s in South Africa, then the Caribbean from my mid-teens — but far enough before that I know what the silence felt like. Information arrived slowly. There was time between receiving it and having to respond. Boredom existed, which meant imagination existed.
My children, raised in Vanuatu, had that slow pace too — island time, where the day moves at the speed of the trade winds and a child’s imagination has room to do its work.
Most children today were born into something different — a world of infinite stimulation, algorithmically curated to maximise the time they spend looking at a screen. The people who built these systems do not allow their own children to use them. The engineers who designed the engagement loops that now govern most children’s attention sent their own kids to screen-free schools in Marin County and Palo Alto.
That is not a coincidence. That is a confession.
The Waypoint exists, in part, because of this — because I believe that understanding the world does not require being bombarded by it. That one hour, once a week, of honest and carefully assembled information is worth more than forty hours of scrolling through a feed designed to make you anxious enough to keep scrolling.
— Justin